Whether you’ve had your Paypal abused, credit details stolen, logged into Facebook only to see a few naughty statements made in your name or whether you’ve electronically been pronounced dead sixteen times - we’ve all been touched by cybercrime.

We hear about it all the time: Online retailer Play.com recently reported that some of their customers’ personal data may have been compromised, and that their users might be sent spam e-mails containing harmful links. TripAdvisor users’ email accounts have been hacked in to during March. Millions of people were at an increased risk of email phishing after a giant security breach at Epsilon, which is having an effect on some of the USA’s largest concerns, such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Walgreens.

Our lives are becoming entwined with technology. Often we are forfeiting security and placing our privacy in jeopardy, all for the sake of speed and convenience. Electronic villains have had a rampant turkey-shoot at online users, almost nearly all the way back to the days of the abacus.

As long as there is a channel and a means, there will always be a certain amount of associated illicit behaviour: more or less guaranteeing that your granny will consistently be on the back foot, shielding her life savings from a kid learning how to hack mailing lists from knitting sites out of his room in Vodka-oozing Vladivostok.

But some brave companies are standing strong. GraphicMail, a web-hosted self-service email marketing provider dedicated to helping small businesses and organizations, has tightened its security once again, after serious new breaches in the email industry. The first quarter of 2011 has seen a surge of severe electronic security breaches via email marketing, and only the best measurements possible will stave off these consumer assaults.

With an infrastructure that is designed to protect clients’ sensitive personal data, all efforts are made to ensure that no person or entity other than the owner of the data can access it.

Speaking passionately about this cringing subject, Ernie Retief, CTO at GraphicMail says: “By using SQL server security together with IP restricted access, our data is secure. What this means is even if you have all the information about our setup, with all the database passwords, you won’t have access if you’re not on the correct IP address. “

This is accomplished by their top of the range Cisco routers and firewalls. Cisco is the industry leader in network speed, security and reliability. So all the holes are covered by Cisco-certified superheroes.

CTO Ernie elaborates: “Our application is also written with malicious attacks in mind. We use external companies to conduct monthly attacks on our code to look for any loopholes. We also undergo a network audit every few months to make sure our security is in order.”

As GraphicMail is continually looking at ways to better serve it's clients we have, with immediate effect, SLASHED the price of our SMS's

Here's what has changed:

100 SMS' now cost ONLY  £7.00 +vat      a whopping 45% decrease over the old price of £12.99 +vat

1,000 SMS' now cost ONLY  £65.00 +vat  a great BIG 35% decrease over old price of £99.99 +vat

10,000 SMS' now cost ONLY  £ 599.00 +vat   a 25% decrease and saving OVER £200 over old price of £799.99 +vat

Now how's THAT for service!

Lots of Love!

So, there you are trialing the GraphicMail account and wondering which susbscription to sign up to. With Valentine’s day only next week you have twice as many emails to send out so which subscription do you sign up for?? Well, for the next 10 days you’re in luck, because we’re doubling the love this Valentine’s day!

To show our undying love for our potential new clients, we’re offering trial users who sign up to any paid business account with GraphicMail before the end of 18th February, double credits.  That means that if you sign up for our 2000 monthly subscription for £9.95, for example, we’ll give you another 2000 credits that monbth absolutely free!  This applies to any of our business accounts*, no matter which monthly or annual subscription your sign up for.

Sign up to a paid account* before 18 February and be our Valentine!

What are you waiting for?  

and enter Promo Code ILOVEGM

 *This offer is valid until 18 February 2011 and does not apply for upgrades to Reseller or Corporate accounts.

But that's not All!

We also have some wonderful new Valentine's Day templates - use them to send your love letters out in style!  These FREE templates will already be loaded in your account once you log in, under "Create Newsletter".

Lots of Love 

Your 'not-so-secret' Admirer

We’re making it possible!

Who “likes” your email-marketing newsletter?

We’ve now made it possible for you to insert a “like” button in the header of your email newsletter.  So now, when one of your readers clicks on the displayed button, your newsletter will automatically appear in their Facebook news feed – which will tell all their friends that they “liked” it too!  And because (of course), their friends will also be able to click on the link and read your newsletter, you achieve the perfect addition to ( or the first step on the ladder to ) your viral marketing campaign - and your email marketing.

You’ll find this in your account under >> Setup and Options located in the  >> Header/footer settings.

Check out our new plug-in ! See how easy you can synchronise your GraphicMail contacts with your Outlook mailing lists and vice versa. 

How does it work ?
When you add a new contact or edit an existing one in Outlook or your Graphicmail Account, the other will be automatically updated to reflect the same changes.  ( You will be able to synchronise all of your contacts in one sweep, but remember that recipients have to opt in to your email marketing emails, so it’s important to keep a separate email marketing contact list as well as your general contact list in Outlook.)

So, if you’ve been using Outlook to do your email marketing and you’ve decided to sign up with GraphicMail to achieve a more professional approach with your email campaigns, you can now convert your existing list into your GraphicMail account very easily, with no need to do it manually. 

What do I need to do?
Because it works just like any other program on Windows XP/Vista or Windows 7, downloading and installing the plug-in is simple -and it can synchronise with Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. You can download the plug-in from http://www.graphicmail.co.uk/downloads/outlooksync.zip

If this weren’t enough excitement for one email…….. you can also synchronise your Gmail or Hotmail contacts to your GraphicMail account.

Jeff realized the hard way that he should have gone with GraphicMail

Ready to unwrap?

Grab the sensational images!

Our designer Elves have been busy again in the run up to this Festive season and have created a complementary template especially for our GraphicMail clients.  What could be better than a free template? The fact that it also comes with a range of custom images.  So, you select the template and then get to choose which of our seasonal images you’d like to insert in the image placeholders.  You can take a sneaky peek at all the available images here.
Simply copy the code or the URL of the image and insert it into the template.  How simple is that?.

If you are a new user of GraphicMail we'd like to give you a little something special this festive season, Sorry there's no virtual mince pies and sherry but how about...

Double credits this season!

GraphicMail trial users get double credits if they upgrade to a subscription account by 24 December 2010.*  So if you are considering signing up with one of the World's Leading newsletter software packages now is the time to do it! Check out our subscription options and low cost pricing.

*This offer is not valid for trial users who sign up to a Reseller or Corporate account and only valid when paid by credit card.

It may be thanksgiving in America on 25th November but we are hoping you'll also be thankful for our changes to the Addressbook that are due to go live on the same day.

With all the lists, datasets, addressbooks, contacts, records, segmentation etc it may be that it all gets confusing and some may lose track of what does what and where to upload what, where and how - and what is the difference between a mailing list and a dataset anyway??

Well we've decided to simplify the whole process and improve the look, feel and navigation of the addressbook

So what have we done? In a nutshell we have simplified the way that the Mailing list and address books work. We've combined them both into one section within your account. This new section will be called "Lists and Contact" and you will be able to manage all you mailing lists and subscriber details from this single section within your account

We've also added a default dataset that will be extremely easy to use and will be pre-populated with the most commonly used fields, like Name, Job title, company etc. However if you are one of many advanced users you will still have the ability to tailor-make one or more datasets to your specific needs

Why have we done it? To make it easier to mange, manipulate and navigate all your lists and contacts

What does it all mean? Mailing lists + address Book = "Lists and Contacts"

What do I need to do? Nothing!

When will I see these changes? Thursday 25th November

Tomorrow, if you visit your Graphicmail Dashboard ( User Interface ) you'll see that it's a bit more user-friendly! Yes, without any change to the functionality of the application, we’ve changed the design and menu structure and on the way, added a few useful features.

So What’s going to change?
Well, for a start, the new Tips section; when selected, this displays tips relating to the particular section of your account that you're navigating

Another useful tool is our new Account dropdown. 
 

When you click on the dropdown menu you’ll see a display of how many credits are left in your account and when they expire.  If you're getting low, you can simply click on the 'Buy More' button and in seconds your send credits are topped-up.

Hope you enjoy these time-saving improvements!

Have any questions? Feedback? Email us at info@graphicmail.co.uk

As a regular user of email, you will, by now be aware of Gmail’s new Priority Inbox feature.

 Still in its BETA phase, but available to all Gmail users, it automatically sorts your inbox into (1) Important emails and (2) everything else. A ‘service’ which has been met with mixed reviews by email marketers. Whilst my own thoughts were pretty negative at the start, I have done some checking within the industry and am beginning to see the positive side. Mainly it will separate the wheat from the chaff and make it easier to focus on quality client leads and client-relationships. 

So, how do you proceed to ensure that you gain from the process?

1)      Emails, by their very nature, are direct and personal, which is why it is the ‘weapon of choice’ for building customer relationships. The benefit of a priority inbox means that for those of your customers who interact with you and your brand campaigns, your emails will be given a higher ranking, further enhancing their trust of your  brand in their inbox.

2)      The long term effect being that Generic messages simply will not get through which makes it even more important that the content of your newsletter is personalised and relevant to your readers and loaded with value. Use the available tools to test, segment your lists and to set up autoresponders for your campaigns.

3)      The Gmail subscribers who are recipients of your email will need to be able to identify your emails very easily if you want them to keep opening. So your business name and/or brand will have to be highly conspicuous in the ‘from’ name, the subject line or the pre-header. That will ensure that, if you’re campaigns are already successful your Gmail subscribers will be quickly aware if your emails are being marked down and re-set you as an important sender.

4)      You will need to concentrate some effort to ensure regular response from your subscribers to prevent your emails from slipping into obscurity. Encourage them constantly to interact and engage with your email newsletters. Make sure that all of your emails carry a very clear call to action, preferably one that encourages engagement, such as clicking a link, replying, or submitting a comment. 

Put simply, Gmail’s priority inbox has changed the email marketing landscape, whilst the benefits of email marketing remain as solid as ever.  It will force you to be better at email marketing which should reward you with an even greater ROI as quality campaigns will be the ones that bubble to the top of Gmail inboxes.